In the summer of 2014 the Fossil team came to the Prototype Studio to help them build a prototype of what would later be called the Fossil Q. It’s a wearable device that looks like a normal watch or bracelet and would be sold in the existing jewelry counters of department stores. The Prototype Studio had 2 jobs, define the technical constraints the creative teams would have to work around and build an early working version using the devices provided by their hardware partner Intel.

It turned out at the time that the Intel hardware was not quite ready to be sent to us so we had our own board built with the same features the Intel hardware had, we hollowed out an existing Fossil watch and put the board in that. This allowed us and the client to put the watch on and tightly iterate on what the features did and how it worked. It also allowed us to understand the constraints of developing a product like this in iOS and we could work with the creative team to come up with solutions around those constraints.

Eventually the Intel hardware was delivered and we swapped that in. This gave us a great starting place to test the capabilities of the Intel hardware and it’s SDK. Then once we were sure we’d be able to provide a great user experience around the hardware a development team was created to build the consumer facing Android and iOS apps. Then almost a year later the Fossil Q was launched.

How do you get 74 Samsung devices all playing different videos synchronized at exactly the right time? You call Aaron and myself from the RGA Prototype Studio. We built a node.js/socket.io/Android platform to allow the director to start/stop/reset the videos on all the devices simultaneously. The devices were all Wi-Fi’ed into a heavy duty router and there was a Samsung laptop running the node server. The director had a slick web-based management console to run the whole thing. The system took 4 days or so to build and it ended up working great. The RGA Content Studio and RGA Samsung team put the whole thing together and it came out amazing. Take a look:

So as it often happens a project we work on at the Prototype Studio takes a while before it actually becomes real and sees the light of day. We worked with the Equinox team about a year ago on this idea. They came to us with some connected stationary bikes and software that was supposed to aggregate all the data. The question posed was “How can we use this to build a polished spin class experience for our members?”. After a few weeks we had a working prototype where 2 riders could compete head-to-head in 2-3 simple games, all built on the same equipment used in the gym. After we got that up and running we handed it off to the Equinox team in RGA who worked months and months on the final consumer-facing experience being launched.

We prototyped out a beacon experience with MasterCard’s Priceless Surprises campaign. The client liked it so much they decided to deploy it during the Northside festival (June 12th-19th 2014). The project was even written up in Fast Company:

We built in beacon-enabled Priceless Surprises into the existing Northside iPhone app that attendees would have downloaded. As they walked around the festival they would get a notification that they received a Priceless Surprise where they were then given free tickets to a concert at the festival. The beacons are a relatively new technology and building a consumer experience around them was…challenging.

Vital Score is an iPad app that you use while in the doctor’s office to quickly asses how healthy you are. I built a phase 1 and phase 2 prototype for them over the course of a few months. They installed the prototype if a few Dr offices and did some user testing. It initially integrated with a Withings scale but we switch to a Pally scale. The Pally scale allowed us to directly connect to the scale via Bluetooth witch allowed for a much better user experience. We then hired an agency to continue development to add user login and roll this out to more doctors.
nbsp;http://vitalscorehealth.com/

After getting into a conversation with a coworker about the e-cigarette we decided to take it upon ourselves to create the first ever connected e-cigarette. We hooked up an Arduino to the e-cig and created a companion iPhone application that showed the user how much money he was saving and how many minutes he added to his life. We also had it tweet out every time he went through a theoretical pack of cigarettes. We had a event at the local bar where he used the device all night and now we can say that we created the first connected e-cigarette (as far as Google is concerned). It even got picked up my some news sites.